Many of my friends know me to have strange tastes in media – often eclectic, sometimes contrarian – and they know that I am always happy to explain my tastes. In discussing things I do and don’t like, I have long been interested in why I differ from other people who I consider to have perfectly valid viewpoints.

Some of that certainly speaks to differences of experience – my life experiences have affected me in particular ways that I recognize are not always the norm – but I also like looking for common threads. (For instance, I have an extended theory of comedy that explains why I don’t care for Seinfeld or the mockumentaries of Christopher Guest.) One of the things that I like to say to people is that I would rather have a great story told poorly than a poor story told excellently. And while that sounds simple enough, and I know what I mean, it needs a bit of explanation.

So that’s what I’m going to do today. I’m going to explain how I differentiate a story from its presentation and why I am more concerned with the former than I am with the latter. In doing so, I will be criticizing things that I know many of my friends enjoy and praising things that will confuse even more people. I will try to be gentle and understanding as I talk about what I don’t like from House of the Dragon or Battlestar Galactica, but you’re just going to have to bear with me as I explain why Sucker Punch is my favorite Zack Snyder film.

For the purposes of this discussion, I’m mostly going to be talking about visual media. Some concepts can be extrapolated into other areas, but I won’t be focusing on those as much. One of the common threads here is that this might seem like a question of form vs function – and it is, kind of. But sometimes it’s not. Let’s just get into it so I can explain myself better.

The problem with Viserys (Character vs Performance)

There’s a moment in the first season of House of the Dragon that has been discussed frequently because of how much it impacted fans of the series. The practically-on-his-deathbed King Viserys surprises everyone by showing up in the throne room and making a long, unassisted walk to his throne. Paddy Considine’s acting in that scene is amazing, and the director is almost certainly right to give the moment a Tarkovsky-like pace, allowing it to have enough time to feel really uncomfortable. And yet, I did not care even a little bit by that point, so I actually laughed out loud at the absurdity of how seriously the show was taking itself.

This moment takes place in episode 8 of that show, and by that point we’ve seen enough of Viserys to judge him as a character. Some people may feel he’s courageous for continuing to support his daughter’s succession, while others may feel he’s weak or even dastardly for not stopping so many of the machinations he can clearly see (and for marrying his daughter’s friend), but ultimately I felt an even more negative reaction – I found him boring.

Regardless of Considine’s masterful performance throughout the series, Viserys as a character completely fails to grab me. His entire arc revolves around the question of succession and whether he should stick with his declaration for Rhaenyra or switch to his new son. But the writers clearly want Viserys’s stance on this to remain an open question, so we just see him constantly waffling for no particular reason other than the fact that it’s too early in the show for this question to be settled. This removes any sense of the character’s actual drives and ideals, making him significantly less interesting to me. For a character who should be pivotal to the story and to the fictional world being presented, there just isn’t enough for him to do. And he doesn’t seem to be decisive enough to do the things he does have to do. Worse still, the series gradually removes any reason for us to care about whatever Viserys might decide, since the rest of the factions are just going to fight about it anyway.

What we end up with by prioritizing performance over character arc is a series of interesting, perhaps even powerful moments that don’t necessarily tell a coherent story. There are styles of story – like slice of life – where this can be perfectly effective. But genre fiction tends to be more plot-heavy, and that’s where this falls flat for me.

Zack Snyder is his own worst enemy (Visual Storytelling)

Okay, I’m not actually going to talk about the Snyderverse of DC films. I don’t like them, but that’s because their story issues are much more pervasive than just the visual language. I’m also not going to talk about 300, because I despise it so much that it would just end up being an unhinged rant with no nuance at all. Instead, I’m going to talk about the only two Snyder films I actually own on disc – Watchmen and Sucker Punch – and the reasons why Sucker Punch is my favorite of Snyder’s directing work.

At his core, Zack Snyder is a visual storyteller. And that’s a phrase that gets tossed around in many different contexts, so I should define it. What I mean in this case is that Snyder thinks and speaks in terms of visuals. When he talks about his films and what he’s trying to say, it becomes readily apparent that he spends significantly more time thinking about the imagery of a scene than about what any particular character is saying in that scene. He has been both praised and derided for his visual faithfulness to the comic panel. And yes, this tendency has often caused him to disconnect from the main story, but usually this happens when it’s someone else’s story, not his own. And that’s the fundamental difference between Watchmen and Sucker Punch.

Watchmen is one of the most iconic graphic novels of all time, so it seemed to make sense for Snyder to be the one to finally bring it to the screen (after multiple previous failed attempts). But it ended up feeling hollow. All the pieces were there – with the exception of the fake psychic alien that was swapped out for a more personal catastrophe – but they don’t carry the same weight as the source material. It’s almost as if an AI algorithm had compiled a movie from a single data point and still managed to make it uncanny. And the reason for this is that Snyder is just copy/pasting. He’s not saying anything. He’s not telling a story, he’s just showing us a photocopy of a screenshot of someone else telling a story.

But Sucker Punch is an original story. Because of this, anything that Snyder chooses to show is there for a reason that he actually understands. He uses his imagery intentionally rather than just copying someone else’s vision. And I’m not about to say the movie is without flaws, but I also think its flaws are hiding some actually interesting storytelling. Snyder’s method is not complex, yet somehow the things that the movie does that are worthwhile are often dismissed. The most important of these is the choice to never show Babydoll’s dancing to the audience. Snyder has said that he doesn’t understand why people didn’t get that he was making a statement about objectification. It’s almost like his very basic flip here was TOO clear and people didn’t quite buy it. Similarly, the very first dream sequence is such an obvious reference to Brazil that it telegraphs what is actually happening. When I saw the movie the first time, this set my expectations for later reveals that were then paid off. So for me, it was a simple story that nevertheless did what it set out to do much more than any other Snyder movie I have seen.

Dark: the most complicated nothing-burger in recent history (Stakes vs Frustrations)

Okay, that’s a very provocative subheader, so I will definitely need to explain myself.

If you haven’t watched Dark, I will warn you that I can’t talk about it without massive spoilers. I’m going to be going into detail about many of the twists and turns the series takes throughout its three seasons. If you do plan to watch it, you may want to skip this part.

Dark begins with a series of terrible and mysterious tragedies, and we soon settle into investigation and exploration by various characters as to how any of these seemingly disparate events may be connected. Soon the viewers (and eventually the characters) realize that there are some serious time-travel shenanigans going on, and we settle in for an extended treatise on determinism. This series doubles down so incredibly hard on determinism that by a few episodes into the second season, I had given up on the plot and was just watching the whole thing unfold like a multi-vehicle accident. I reached a point in my viewing where the various attempts by characters to unravel the deterministic threads just became darkly comical.

And honestly, I might have been okay with that as the entire point of the series if the writers didn’t decide to half-ass their way into a resolution that completely failed to address any of that determinism and instead made it some Philosophy 101 version of quantum entanglement plus some really gross age-play time travel relationship stuff.

But the main issue that comes out of doubling down on determinism is the loss of stakes. The characters keep struggling to make things happen – which is what characters do – but the dramatic irony is that none of those struggles can possibly amount to anything. And the audience is constantly reminded of this. Everything keeps failing, so there is no possibility of success. And the problem with this is that the inevitability of failure is just as uninteresting as easy success. There is no tension in each moment because we already know the outcome. There’s only pathos as the characters are repeatedly frustrated on their journeys. Dark attempts to obfuscate all this by making the time travel threads ridiculously complex. And sure, that seems to have worked for some people. It did not work for me.

The series also has a massive problem in that most of the early McGuffins are set aside along the way, and then in the end we learn that none of the storylines or even characters actually matter, and the whole thing was secretly about a minor character’s unrelated tragedy all along. It’s all very unsatisfying.

Does your Mystery Box have a Plan? (Telling vs Promising)

The Battlestar Galactica reboot had a lot going for it, but it also had some significant issues. For me personally, it ran afoul of my occasional problem with shows where the showrunners have vastly different ideas about which characters and storylines are interesting than I do. Gaius Baltar, Colonel Tigh, and Chief Tyrol all bored me initially, then angered me as they continued to be focus characters despite increasingly obnoxious story arcs. Some of this comes down to the Character vs Performance issue, because I see the argument that the actors were doing a fine job. However, the choices of what was done with those characters – particularly in terms of favoring them over other characters I actually did find interesting – just felt like bad storytelling to me.

But the biggest issue the series had was The Plan.

I put that in all-caps not because I’m necessarily referring to the special event side episode that happened later (although that thing didn’t do the series any favors), but because I’m referring to The Plan as an overarching concept and theme. The series doubled down so hard on the question of what the Cylons were planning that they kept assuring the audience “…And they have a plan” despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. This made the series a perfect example of why the Mystery Box doesn’t work for telling stories. It’s nothing but repeatedly baiting and switching, then trying to use the exact same bait again. I would have loved some simple acknowledgement from the showrunners that even the Cylons’ plan had gone off the rails after the initial Fall, and now they were just making things up and arguing amongst themselves too. But no, they had to keep claiming that everything was going perfectly for the Cylons, and if we couldn’t see that it’s just because we weren’t as clever as them and – by extension – the writers of the show.

Well, bite me, BSG writers. You weren’t clever. You completely failed to wish a clever resolution into existence. And this is a trap that everyone who has tried this has fallen into. Everything JJ Abrams has done, most of the later works of M Night Shyamalan, and even stories that otherwise seemed to be going somewhere (Dark) have fallen into the trap of writers being convinced that they are brilliant enough to finish whatever they started even though they didn’t have a goal in mind at the outset.

In terms of the story, the artificial engagement the audience experiences when trying to figure out the mystery box becomes retroactively hollow when it turns out the story wasn’t there from the beginning but was simply cobbled together at the last minute.

Suggestions for further viewing?

So by now you may be wondering about positive examples. What are the pieces of media I might recommend for their stories despite their flaws? (Other than Sucker Punch, because I’m not necessarily trying to get anyone to watch or rewatch that one.)

I find myself enjoying quite a lot of animated series these days – not just anime, but stuff produced in English. Shows like Owl House, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, and Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts are things I would recommend wholeheartedly. I know some adults don’t take cartoons very seriously unless they’re super violent or otherwise geared towards older audiences, and that’s honestly a shame. I would rank those three stories above any of the media I’ve criticized here, and indeed over many series I would otherwise rate positively.

But perhaps it would be more useful to do a “watch this, not that” list that lines up with the things I’ve mentioned above. So here we go:

• Instead of House of the Dragon, watch Shadow and Bone or The Dragon Prince.
• Instead of Snyder’s Watchmen, watch the Watchmen (2019) series or Raising Dion.
• Instead of Dark, watch The Peripheral or a time-hopping anime like Your Name or The Girl Who Leapt Through Time.
• Instead of Battlestar Galactica, watch Babylon 5 or the original V.

Or, you know, watch whatever you want. Obviously, tastes vary widely. I’m just here to explain mine.